Turning Japanese!

The last couple of weeks have been a bit bitty in terms of Bunker visits; man-flu, engineer visits and numerous other real world stuff impeding progress but not stopping it.

My current focus is preparation for the Ronin game in June so a fair bit of work has been towards that.

Firstly I tried to be clever with the painting of a Japanese temple, it had lots of timber lines that I was never going to be able to paint freehand (especially with my DT's (joke)) and so I decided to mask it up.

Great in theory, but then I decided to use a contrast paint for the timber lines, mainly due to it being the colour I wanted but also because the paint flows nice, actually it flows so nice it can get behind the masking tape...

So ultimately I was left with a lot of freehand tidying up, but it came out alright in the end (if you don't get too close).

Next I finished a group of figures that had become right bugbears and really put me off doing any painting.

These are Daimyo and Retinue by Warlord Games, lovely figures but I had put a base coat on them some time back and on returning to them this week I really thought what I had done previously was rather poor. I tried to fix the poor start and it just started to look worse and so ultimately I re-undercoated chunks of each and effectively started again. For some reason I had a real block on what to do with these figures, ultimately deciding to give them the same colour armour to show they were from the same faction but went with individual clothing colours. I think they came out alright in the end but I don't think rank as some of the best work I've done - please excuse the poor pictures.

Once these were finally out of the way prep started for the next batch of work, another building (Temple Bell) and two additional factions Monks and Bushi.

This weekend sees me off to Ayton to play the 18th Century game I've prepared some figures for (and compared to others apparently have prepared next to nothing), meet new people and have a cheeky beer or two. If I survive the weekend I'll give an update in my next blog.

I decided to try a new approach in transporting the few figures I have done and have invested in some magnetic sheeting and a metal based storage box.

I added a metallic sheet to the side of the box to facilitate the taller figures i.e. flag bearers, if this approach proves successful I'll move more of my figures to this solution for safe transportation to club nights.

And finally this weeks Marvel figure, Doctor Octopus!

Have a better one!!